Lebohang Kganye Le Sale ka Kgotso

Lebohang Kganye doesn’t do simple goodbyes. Her new installation, Le Sale ka Kgotso—opening September 12 at Fotografiska Berlin—takes its name from a Sesotho farewell that should mean “stay in peace.” But mispronounce it, and suddenly you’ve summoned a tokoloshe, a chaotic, dangerous spirit out of Xhosa and Zulu myth. That slippage between blessing and curse is where Kganye works her magic, turning language, memory, and home into haunted terrain.

A Ghost House of History

The installation transforms a Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) house—Mandela-era post-apartheid housing—into a spectral steel-and-aluminum skeleton. Step inside and you’re not in a home but a stage: five eerie scenes unfold like living folklore. A giant rat, a drowned mermaid, shadows that morph into snakes—each vignette fuses oral tradition with political ghosts, the everyday with the mythic. The tokoloshe doesn’t just lurk. It sweeps the streets, worn but relentless.

Between Myth and Memory

Kganye has always blurred family memory with national history, refusing nostalgia in favor of the unresolved present. Here, myth, superstition, and ritual don’t belong to the past—they bleed into the now. It’s intimate and uncanny, staged yet alive. Think theater of the ancestors with a punk streak of resistance.

The Artist

Born in South Africa in 1990, Kganye is fresh off her Deutsche Börse Photography Prize win and about to take MoMA by storm with New Photography 2025. Her work lives in collections from the V&A to the Getty, but Berlin gets her haunted house first.

Le Sale ka Kgotso runs September 12, 2025, through January 25, 2026 at Fotografiska Berlin.